Machine Gun America, in Kissimmee, Fla., is one of the few places in the U.S. where it is legal for civilians to shoot fully-automatic rifles.

Photos and remembrances of shooting victims cover the wall surrounding the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., where 49 people were killed in 2016.

A customer lines up a shot at Machine Gun America.

Life and death in the Gunshine State

By Rick Holmes

Jan. 25, 2019

Kissimmee, Fla. – Just north of here is Pulse. Three years ago, Pulse pulsed with music and life. The nightclub was a bright light on a bland city street, a haven for a crowd that was mostly young, gay and Latin.

Today the music has stopped. Pulse hides behind a black plywood wall decorated with photos, posters and plaques honoring the 49 people killed by Omar Mateen, a troubled young man with powerful guns.

A few hours south of here is Parkland, where a year ago Nikolas Cruz, another young man with mental health issues and a semi-automatic rifle, pulled a fire alarm in Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and started shooting at anyone in sight. When the shooting stopped, 14 students and three staff members were dead.

In between Pulse and Parkland is Machine Gun America, one of the few places in the country where it’s legal to fire a fully automatic rifle.

Florida is all about fantasy and games. You can act out your fairy tale fantasies at Disney’s magic castle or your wizardry fantasies at Universal’s Hogwarts. If your fantasy is spewing hot lead like your favorite action movie hero, Machine Gun America is for you.

Living your fantasies doesn’t come cheap, especially here in central Florida, but I wanted to know more about the power of guns on young men’s minds. So I plunked down my $75 – good for one gun and 25 bullets – and wrapped my arms around an AK-47. It’s the most popular gun among mass shooters, and the most popular gun at Machine Gun America.

You stand in one place and fire down the range to your target. You can’t roam from room to room, shooting down kids hiding beneath their desks. There may be a computer game that lets you do that, but here all you can shoot are paper targets: silhouettes, zombies or the one I chose, picturing a dozen foreign pariahs, from Hitler to bin Laden.

With a semi-automatic, you have to squeeze the trigger again if you wanted to fire a second shot. But this was a fully automatic weapon. I first tried firing just one shot at a time, hoping to prolong the experience. Then I gave into an urge and blew out the rest of the magazine at the international bad guys, blasting away like Al Pacino in “Scarface.”

Here in Florida, that’s called having a good time.

I’m not knocking it. I didn’t see any mass murderers in Machine Gun America, and the paper targets spilled no blood. There are all kinds of experiences you can purchase here that you shouldn’t try at home. The latest I’ve seen are ax-throwing establishments.

But the guns of Florida aren’t all fun and games, and some of the people carrying them don’t know where fantasy ends and reality begins.

As veteran Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiassen noted the day I visited Machine Gun America: “We live in a notorious firing range, the Gunshine State, where the rush of blood-splattered headlines seldom lets us catch our breath.”

That day’s headlines featured another troubled young man with a gun. According to his ex-girlfriend, Zephen Xaver, 21, “always hated people and wanted everyone to die.” He didn’t act out his fantasies until Jan. 23, when he walked into a bank branch office in Sebring, pulled out a handgun and ordered the five women inside to lie face-down on the floor. Then he shot each of them through the back of the head.

You might not have heard about it. Unless the body count is especially high – 58 killed at a 2017 concert in Las Vegas is the current record-holder – or the victims are especially sympathetic, like the 27 killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School, or it’s a slow news day, the latest mass shooting is just words crawling across the bottom of the TV screen.

Gun violence comes in many forms: suicide, domestic violence, gang warfare. Mass shootings, though, where the killer targets strangers for the thrill of carnage, used to be extremely rare. Not any more. Definitions vary, but by all measures, the number of mass shootings in the U.S. have increased. The Sebring attack was the seventh mass shooting in Florida in less than three years.

Florida has a strong gun culture and weak gun laws. I don’t begrudge people their hobbies or their fantasies. I don’t want to blame all gun-owners for the acts of a handful of troubled young men. But something is going on here, and you can’t disconnect the shooter from the gun. One thing is clear: When a crazed person loses the ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality, he can do a lot more damage with an AK-47 than if the only weapon available was an ax.